Christmas tree is hung with stories

Our Christmas tree is up, and it's beautiful. We got a shorter one this year so we used fewer ornaments. There are still a few in the boxes that didn't make it up this year.

Our Christmas tree is up, and it's beautiful. We got a shorter one this year so we used fewer ornaments. There are still a few in the boxes that didn't make it up this year.

A few months back, David tried to throw out our original box of plastic ornaments from our first Christmas together.

He actually piled them in the box that has traveled with us all of these years right on top of the garbage can.

As I pulled in the driveway, I saw them and retrieved them. David looked at me like I was a crazed hoarder, going through a dumpster of garbage. But these were our first ornaments, and even though we don't use them anymore, throwing them away seemed like something I just couldn't do.

We have added new ornaments through the years. My favorites are the ones that the kids have made.

Little gingerbread men, with their preschool pictures inserted as the face. There are a few hand-painted ones, and even a small bird made out of sculpting clay. We even have one that has our last name painted above a fancy front door that the girls love.

There is one that makes me sad, and every year I place it at the top of the tree.

It is a red ornament, and painted on it is Engine 54 F.D.N.Y. 4 Truck "Pride of Midtown. Never missed a performance." Below that is written Firefighter John Tipping. He was killed on 9/11, in Tower 2.

His father was a firefighter with my father, and they are still close. I recall many F.D.N.Y. picnics as a kid, and John Tipping was always there. He was so cute. So handsome. He died way too young.

The other day, we received a package from David's aunt. In it were old — I mean, OLD — glass ornaments that belonged to his grandmother and great-grandmother. They are amazing!

There were even some very old-looking Santas and some small stockings. As soon as David saw them, he smiled and told the girls how his grandmother would line them up the banister of her house.

Christmas has a thread woven through it so tightly.

Love and family weave a tapestry from generation to generation. I paused after opening that box of ornaments from Christmas past once held by a woman I never met, decorating a home I never stood in.

I thought of my family now and the ones to come that I will never meet, and thought, maybe that F.D.N.Y. ornament will be on a tree of a Christmas yet to be.

Who knows, maybe even my cheap plastic ones will be hung somewhere one day.

Those ornaments represent where I took hold of that thread. Where my family of Christmas present began.